Executed in 1976, when the great Ugandan artist Leonard Kateete was still a student at the Margaret Trowell School of Industrial and Fine Arts, this is the portrait of his wife Anna Theresa Nabasirye, the artist’s classmate and live-in girlfriend at the time. He painted her when she was pregnant with his baby, a child who never lived. The picture, first displayed in the Kateete household in Kampala as well as in Nairobi, later was possessed by Anna’s family in Katende, a village in Mpigi, where it suffered scratches and attracted dust in the years after Anna’s death in 2002. One day in September 2025, after a plan was hatched to retrieve this masterpiece and save it for its rightful place in a collection of museum-quality pieces, Muhumuza and Kateete drove all the way to Katende in search of it. After they took possession of the painting, Kateete retouched it in Nairobi, where he has lived and worked since the early 1980s.
